San Juan

#5 ASBS, Puerto Rico card game, English language edition

This item is currently backordered [more info] with no firm available date.
As soon as it's available you'll be able to purchase it right here.
It may also be available in another edition. Try:
San Juan

Notify me if/when this item becomes available:(you will be asked to log in first)

Product Description

Puerto Rico's golden age returns -- through you! Players travel now to the capital city of this beautiful island. Who will build the most important buildings? Players build palaces, poor houses, silver smelters, gold mines, and many others -- each with its own special features. The cleverest player will build well and win!

As with the board game, players choose roles which can help all players, but the choosing player gets a special privilege with the role chosen. Players build buildings, produce and sell goods, and so on. The game is based on Puerto Rico, but different enough to give players new challenges and opportunities for fun and enjoyment.

Product Reviews

San Juan first appeared in 2004, and remains an outstanding, tried and true card game
even by today's standards. Some eight years after its initial release, it continues
to hold up well even in the midst of an increasingly crowded and strong field of card
games. Its initial positive reception was undoubtedly enhanced by the fact that it
was standing on the shoulders of the euro giant Puerto Rico. As a card game based on
the most popular boardgame at the time, there was never going to be any doubt that
there was a ready market willing to lap up a card game version of what was arguably
the most popular strategy game of the day. Of course, San Juan had to live up to the
hype, and it did. Even though it's a much lighter game than Puerto Rico, the role
selection mechanic made a smooth transition to a card game, and using cards as
currency, goods, and as buildings proved to be a streamlined system that worked well.
Sacrificing some of depth of its much-loved big brother came with the advantage of
quick game-play, especially with two players, and it's no surprise that even today
San Juan is one of the top-ranked games from the 2004 crop of games.

So how does it work? Players use a shared deck of 110 cards, which feature a variety
of buildings on them, each of which gives you special abilities and earns you points.
Game-play is determined by Puerto Rico's role-selection mechanic, where a player
chooses from one of five available roles (Builder, Producer, Trader, Councillor,
Prospector). On a player's turn, he chooses a role and carries it out (getting a
small bonus for choosing it), and then the other players carry out the same role in
turn order. You can construct buildings by playing them from your hand, and paying
their cost by discarding the appropriate number of other cards from your hand. In
addition to buildings that will reduce your building costs (e.g. Quarry, Smithy), or
generally make your economic engine more efficient in a variety of ways, there are
also production buildings which let you produce goods (using the Producer role),
which you can then sell to draw cards (using the Trader role). The game ends when a
player has built 12 buildings, at which point the player with the highest score wins!

There's a lot to like about San Juan. It captures the essence of Puerto Rico, but
boils it down to a shorter playing time and with a lighter feel, by removing elements
such as colonists and a separate currency, and adding cards and the aesthetic beauty
of Franz Vohwinkel's artwork. The fact that it's a card game means that there is an
element of luck of the draw, but this forces you to make constant decisions about
which cards to build or discard, and keeps each game fresh and different by forcing
you to adjust your strategy based on the cards you get. There's also a lot of room
for skilful play - while hand management is particularly important, it needs to be
combined with clever use of role selection, as well as trying to string together a
series of buildings that will magnify their usefulness. The role-selection mechanic
also ensures a healthy degree of interaction that requires you to keep a close eye on
what your opponents are doing, without ever becoming nasty or directly
confrontational. Unlike it's older brother Puerto Rico, San Juan has the advantage of
being especially good with just 2 or 3 players, and the two player game is
particularly satisfying. While it doesn't match the intensity of its board game
ancestor, San Juan should be evaluated as an independent package, and as such it's a
streamlined game that provides fast and addictive gameplay, avoids complexity, and
has a high degree of replayability. Highly recommended!

San Juan joins Ra
and Modern
Art as one of the best games ever (in my opinion).

What is good about it?

It plays very fast. People that know the rules can play
it in about a half hour.

It has high repeatability. We have played this game
more than any other recently, and it is still capable of
generating surprises.

It has many paths to victory. Many games strive for
different paths to victory, but most fail.

I disagree with other reviewers here in that I think the
cards are very very well balanced. Many times we have
played a game of San Juan and then someone, after the game
was over, complained that there was one obvious path to
victory and it was just a matter of drawing the best cards--
that we had figured out the game.

In the next game or two, however, someone else has come up
with a way of exceeding the performance of the previous hot
card combo. More importantly, it's always different people
complaining about the card combo, and different people who
come up with a better way to play. The balance of power has
shifted in this game many times.

Another reviewer said this game was not too deep and not
too light, somewhere in the middle. I agree that it plays
quickly and easily, but that the decisions are deep and
interesting. This to me is not a bug but a feature-- easy
and yet deep gameplay.

The only drawback to this game that I can see is that I
am now hesitant to introduce new players to this game, since
the old players are practicing a highly optimized strategy
based on many previous game sessions.